Senior Back End Engineer, Hazel AI

About Altruist

Altruist is transforming the multi-trillion dollar wealth management industry by building an AI platform for wealth professionals. We partner with financial advisors nationwide, empowering them to grow, optimize time and resources, and deliver superior outcomes for their clients.

We're looking for exceptional talent to help us achieve our mission of making financial advice better, more affordable, and accessible to all. If you're passionate about challenging the status quo and want to do the most important work of your life, we'd love to meet you!

But first, our values

Kindness - Kindness doesn’t just equal niceness. We listen to understand. We embrace, and encourage healthy debate and diverse perspectives. We approach conflict openly, honestly, and respectfully.

Brilliance - Humility is the skill we’re most proud of and possessing a growth mindset is always top of mind. We take ownership in everything we touch; regularly using our unique superpowers to reach a common goal as a team. We succeed and fail as one.

Grit - When challenges arise, we stay laser focused on achieving our mission and finding a way forward, even when it’s hard. We are nimble and maintain a sense of urgency, swiftly adapting to change and overcoming obstacles.

About Hazel

Hazel is building the AI engine for wealth management that helps unlock 10x growth, efficiency and value for financial advisors and their clients in a regulated industry. Since its launch last September, Hazel has organically and rapidly grown its user base.

Hazel is a part of Altruist’s broader mission to make financial advice better, more affordable, and accessible to all.

This role is hybrid, with four in-office days per week at our San Francisco FiDi location.

The opportunity

We recently launched hazel.ai, an AI assistant that has ~10x’d users in one month and are excited to hire an AI engineer to build the AI engine at the heart of the product. This engine will: 

• connect to our users’ systems of record, 
• parse, extract and store structured and unstructured information and 
• deliver proactive insights that convert data into actionable outcomes (save time, taxes & fees).

Your impact

• Customer focused - Demonstrate an eagerness to
• Deeply understand the industry, the opportunity and our users
• Interact with them and learn about their needs and frustrations
• Design and execution - Architect robust systems across data, model and product layers that bring our vision to life
• Build scalable data pipelines to store, sync and extract large amounts of information from unstructured and structured data
• Optimize our search and retrieval infrastructure to parse all relevant extracted information to produce grounded, accurate and low latency responses to user queries
• Collaborate with product managers and subject matter experts to build steerable AI systems
• Craft and maintain evaluation datasets, scoring modules and integrate them into our deployment pipeline to continuously monitor and improve the quality of our AI products 
• Relentless - Proactively identify, unblock and mitigate risks that can minimize our chance of timely success
• Leadership - Act as a leader and steward of engineering best practices, mentoring other engineers towards maximizing impact
• Curiosity - Stay ahead of the curve with latest developments in machine learning, AI and how it can be leveraged to build industry leading products

What you bring

• Experience - 6+ years with some of them contributing towards building ML systems at scale, in a production setting. Have built and/or used
  • ranking or recommender systems,
  • generative AI products, or
  • vector databases, search indices, or other data stores for search and retrieval use cases
• Education - Bachelors/Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or a related field
• Foundations - A deep understanding of data structures, algorithms, and sound software engineering principles
• Technical aptitude - You have excellent problem solving skills, can break down a complex problem into simpler constituent parts and know when to take a first principles approach and when not to reinvent the wheel
• Intentional communication - intentional dialogue is a superpower. You listen as well as you share your perspective with others
• Resilience - We’re inspired by your unwavering determination to achieve success, no matter the adversity you face along way
• Bonus Points - Familiarity with statistical and mathematical underpinnings of machine learning and large language models

San Francisco, CA salary range

$200,000—$250,000 USD

What we bring

Attracting and retaining top-tier talent is a priority. We are proud of the culture we’ve built and are cognizant of the ever-changing professional landscape. Our dynamic offering of perks and benefits are tailored for you to feel your best while doing your best.

• Stunning, amenity-filled office spaces in Culver City, CA, San Francisco, CA, and Dallas, TX. Our offices are intentionally designed for comfort, collaboration, and productivity. 
• Competitive total compensation.
• Premium healthcare, dental, and vision insurance plans (HMO and PPO).
• 401k savings plan with a 4% match and immediate vesting.
• 16 week paid parental leave after one year of employment.
• Professional growth and development opportunities including an employee mobility program and an annual L&D budget allocation for each employee.
• Company perks program (includes discounts on pet insurance, fitness, cell phone plans, and travel, etc.).
• Financial guidance program (includes counseling on navigating debt, tracking personal spend, saving and planning goals, home-purchasing preparedness, etc.).
• One month work from anywhere policy (with the exception of a few countries).

Total compensation includes a competitive benefits package, along with a bonus program for eligible roles. For salaried positions, a salary offer will be determined by a number of factors including experience, skill level, internal pay equity, geographic location, and other relevant business considerations. We review all employee pay and compensation programs regularly to ensure fair, equitable, and competitive pay. At Altruist, we are committed to providing fair, equitable, and competitive compensation by leveraging market data to inform our pay bands. Base salaries will be reviewed at regular intervals throughout the year, typically in conjunction with performance review cycles. By evaluating compensation on a regular basis, we are able to reward high performance and ensure all employees have opportunities for growth.

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Altruist we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.